How much do you want to be forgiven?

Then forgive that much and then some.

Every morning, I say The Lord’s Prayer (Gospel of Matthew 6.9-13) with my son.

I’ve started to play around with it the way a musician might improvise when playing an old hit before a live audience. Changing things like the emphasis on certain words or the rhythm of my speech reveals little surprises.

Here’s one example:

“Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors” (verse 12).

One day I flipped it:

“As we forgive our debtors, forgive our debts.”

Oh.

I think the latter version is what Jesus meant. That is, let us receive mercy in proportion to the mercy that we give to those who need it from us.

In the classic recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the emphasis is on God forgiving us followed by a mumbled “as we have forgiven” dragging along behind. Almost as if to say: “God, when we feel sufficiently forgiven, we’ll go do some forgiving, too.”

Every part of the Lord’s Prayer is about God and what we need God to do for us. Except this one line in verse 12. It’s the only part of the Lord’s Prayer where we are the ones who take action. And God’s action seems conditional and proportional to the action we take.

The action the Lord’s Prayer demands of us is not to praise God (“hallowed be your name”), get out and proselytize (“your kingdom come”), get to work (“give us our daily bread”), and work on our willpower (“lead us not into temptation”). Though these seem to be the things evangelical Christians in America (like me) emphasize the most. We like to demand that others join us in glorifying God, working hard, and being pious.

Yet if we say the Lord’s Prayer every day like I have for two years, it becomes plain that the action that matters most to God is our forgiveness, mercy. This is so important to God that he draws a line of causation between our mercy to others and his mercy to us.

For more reading on this idea, check out Jesus’s ‘Parable of the Unmerciful Servant’ in Gospel of Matthew 18.21.35.

Our work as Christians is nothing more than to simply show mercy long before anyone asks it of us or meets our conditions for forgiveness. The Lord’s Prayer is almost like a statement of faith: “God, we know you’ll take care of everything. So, being sure of that, we’re just going to focus on going out and showing radical mercy in the world.”

So if we’re to be people of radical mercy, how are we doing?